CODEWITHSUNDEEP
nokogiri
ben
ben

Reputation: 29777

How do I use Nokogiri to extract the text from this HTML and keep the <br> elements?

I have this string

<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<!DOCTYPE en-note SYSTEM \"http://xml.evernote.com/pub/enml.dtd\">\n\n\n<en-note>\n<font size=\"5\">text_part_1</font><br><br>\n<font size=\"5\">text_part_2</font><br><br>\n<font size=\"5\">text_part_3</font>

I need to extract the text content, but also keep the <br> elements. So the result would be

text_part_1<br><br>text_part_2<br><br>text_part_3

How can I use Nokogiri to do this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 441

Answers (2)

the Tin Man
the Tin Man

Reputation: 160551

Part of the problem is, your XML is illegal. <br> is unterminated; It should be <br/> in XML, or have a end-tag, i.e., </br>.

Nokogiri is raising errors when trying to parse the XML as a result. If you check the errors method after parsing you'll see something like:

[
#<Nokogiri::XML::SyntaxError: Premature end of data in tag br line 7>,
#<Nokogiri::XML::SyntaxError: Premature end of data in tag br line 7>,
#<Nokogiri::XML::SyntaxError: Premature end of data in tag br line 6>,
#<Nokogiri::XML::SyntaxError: Premature end of data in tag br line 6>,
#<Nokogiri::XML::SyntaxError: Premature end of data in tag en-note line 5>
]

Fix that, and Nokogiri will be able to process the XML correctly. At that point, you'll be able to do something simple like:

require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::XML(<<EOT)
<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>
<!DOCTYPE en-note SYSTEM \"http://xml.evernote.com/pub/enml.dtd\">


<en-note>
<font size=\"5\">text_part_1</font><br/><br/>
<font size=\"5\">text_part_2</font><br/><br/>
<font size=\"5\">text_part_3</font>
EOT

doc.search('br').each do |br|
  br.replace('##br##')
end


text = doc.content.gsub('##br##', '<br/>')
puts text

Here's the output with the corrected br tags:

text_part_1<br/><br/>
text_part_2<br/><br/>
text_part_3

The simplest way to fix the XML is to run some cleanup code before parsing it, like:

doc = Nokogiri::XML(xml.gsub('<br>', '<br/>'))

where xml is the variable containing your XML content.

Upvotes: 1

Chris Salzberg
Chris Salzberg

Reputation: 27374

How about:

html =  "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<!DOCTYPE en-note SYSTEM \"http://xml.evernote.com/pub/enml.dtd\">\n\n\n<en-note>\n<font size=\"5\">text_part_1</font><br><br>\n<font size=\"5\">text_part_2</font><br><br>\n<font size=\"5\">text_part_3</font>"
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
str = ""
doc.traverse { |n| str << n.to_s if (n.name == "text" or n.name == "br") }
str #=> "text_part_1<br><br>text_part_2<br><br>text_part_3"

Upvotes: 0

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